40 years later, and Daniel Ellsberg still scares the hell out of me.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/40-years-later-and-Daniel-by-Henry-Porter-101025-215.html
October 26, 2010
By Henry Porter
I remember the weekend the Pentagon Papers were first published. I
know it was a weekend, because Dad took us to visit Grandpa, and he
only had custody of us on the weekends. I was too young to understand
the full import of the story at the time. But there was no doubt this
was big news.
It wasn't just the fact this story was plastered across the front
page of the New York Times. Something is plastered across the front
page of the New York Times every day. However, this was the first
time I saw something on the front page of the New York Times that
made adults go nuts.
Dad was furious. He'd read a bit of the story, then he'd start
shaking the paper and yelling about how outrageous and irresponsible
it was. Grandpa just kept pointing at the paper and saying, "Keep
reading. It gets worse."
I knew it was something about the war, but in 1971 I didn't need the
New York Times to tell me the war in Viet Nam was bad. Mom had been
taking us to protest marches since I could remember. This was clearly
something different because I'd never seen Dad so upset about the war before.
While Dad was reading and seething, I asked Grandpa what all the fuss
was about. It took me awhile to understand what was driving people
nuts was the fact they'd been lied to about something very important.
I asked Grandpa who lied and he said, "Everybody."
When you're a kid you know adults are lying to you. They lie to you
about Santa Claus. They lie to you about the Easter Bunny. They lie
to you about the Tooth Fairy. They lie about how much they loved your
artwork. But those were lies to spare your feelings. Everybody did
it. Except Grandpa. He didn't believe in sugar coating stuff.
Grandpa's answer floored me. "Everybody? If everybody's lying...." I
tried to wrap my little head around the implications of that concept.
If everybody was lying, who do you trust? There was only one answer
to that question. If everybody is lying, then you can't trust anybody.
This was the first time Daniel Ellsberg scared the hell out of me,
and I didn't even know he existed.
It wasn't until I was in college that I started to put this stuff in
context. By then, the war was long over. Nixon was out of office.
Watergate had come and gone. I finally understood that when Grandpa
said "Everybody," he really meant "Everybody in positions of
authority." That's not a hard concept to grasp. I grew up as cynical
as the rest of my generation. Reagan didn't surprise me. I saw Bush's
threat to the constitution clear as a bell, even before congress
abandoned its constitutional duty in October, 2001. After all this
time I thought I was pretty jaded. In spite of that I dared believe
we had turned the tide in 2006 and stopped the slide in 2008.
So you can imagine my surprise when Daniel Ellsberg made an
unscheduled appearance at the recent Wikileaks press conference shown
on CSPAN and scared the hell out of me all over again. When you
listen to what Ellsberg is saying, I'm sure it will scare you, too.
Here's what he said starting around 1:05:30 on the tape:
Secrecy is essential to empire... Under Obama, as under Bush, we are
moving more toward the British system of control of information,
which is after all, The Official Secrets Act, which is a legacy of
empire and that torch is passing. A Republican administration -- a
Republican House and Senate, if that comes in to being in the next
month is almost certain to pass a British-type Official Secrets Act.
Essentially ending leaks of the sort we have seen over the last forty
years, sixty years.
A reasonable person might wonder why he would make such an incendiary
statement without backing it up? Ellsberg did back it up when he
first spoke at 29:01 and laid out the explicit reasoning behind that
assertion.
The threat that is being made by the Pentagon, as we read over the
last few days, of warning news men to stand away from this material,
to refuse to receive it, if they do receive it to return it, seems
absurd on its face. We're not dealing with the 7,000 pieces of paper,
top secret pieces of paper that comprised the Pentagon Papers...with
cyber material its all over the world right now and in several papers
right now. The demand seems absurd.
At 29:49 he explains why this seemingly absurd demand is so chilling.
I understand the reason for those words. Because they echo the words
first used against me the legal words of 18 UCS 793 paragraphs D and
E. Which for the first time used the so-called Espionage Act as if it
were the kind of Official Secrets Act that you have in Britain which
simply criminalizes the release of classified material to any
unauthorized person.
We don't have such a law. And the irony now is that President Obama
in making these clear threats of applying this law to anyone who
deals with this information -- including not only the journalist --
the words apply to any of the people who read it and don't return it
to the proper authorities, actually. President Obama's threats are
not entirely without credibility here because he has started as many
prosecutions for leaks as all previous presidents put together.
It's a small number. It's three. The last one is Bradley Manning.
It's small because we don't have an Official Secrets Act.
Ellsberg goes on to describe how the case against Bradley Manning,
the presumptive source of the Wikileaks information, is being used as
a test case to set the precedent he is predicting will come. If you
think I'm giving Ellsberg too much credit, or not giving Obama
enough, let me remind you this is not happening in a vacuum. In 2006,
I wrote The Department of Precrime and the Thought Police. It covered
the "Virginia Jihad" case that resulted in reduced sentences ranging
from life plus 45 year for one defendant to a mere 65 years for
another -- in federal prison. Parole is not going to happen in their
lifetime. Must have been some serious terrorist threat, right?
None of the convictions handed down were for planning an act of
terrorism. Prosecutors presented no evidence that any of the 11
convicted men had planned U.S. attacks. At best they were convicted
for being pro-terrorist. That may seem like a fine point to some, but
I will let a supporter of this trial and its verdict demonstrate the
real threat this represents -- to all of us right here in the USA:
"We're arresting people for talking about things, thinking about
things, training for things," said Andrew McBride, a former federal
prosecutor in Alexandria. "I think you will see more of it as the
government moves from a traditional criminal law model of post-event
reaction to pre-event interdiction."
When I wrote that, one comment summed it up beautifully, saying
"Going after people based upon "what they are thinking" should set
off alarm bells in any thinking person's head."
In 2006, I thought that was right on the money. In 2008, I thought we
had dodged a bullet. But Ellsberg certainly set my alarm bells
ringing today. Now that we have seen they can put people away for
what they think. What makes you think they won't start putting people
away for what they see? Ellsberg may not be the "Most Dangerous Man
in America" anymore, but that's only because there are people in
Washington working overtime to claim that title.
.
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